Relevance Theory And Drama Translation

This thesis tries to investigate drama translation from the point of view of relevance theory. The study reveals the close interrelationship between relevance theory and drama translation. It is suggested that a view of drama translation as an act of communication indeed reveals several of its special features and can actually constitute a first step towards the establishment of a unified theoretical framework for the study of drama translation.This thesis sets outs with a rough sketching of the relevance-theoretic framework and an account of its implications for translation as identified by Gutt, so that the readers can get acquainted with the framework that will be used later on. Then, the implications of the application of this framework to drama translation are investigated with respect to its special nature, which differs from the translation of any other genres in literature. After some observations on the invariants of drama translation as identified within relevance theory, the thesis analyzes the uniqueness of drama translation through the comparison between two famous Chinese translations of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, one by Cao Yu and the other by Zhu Shenghao, which can represent the two different styles of drama translation, audience-oriented and reader-oriented, respectively.Based on the above discussion and analysis, the final chapter of this thesis presents a unified account of drama translation from a relevance-theoretic perspective, as a basis for successful drama translation. All these come to the conclusion that relevance-theoretical framework can assist the translators of dramatic texts by identifying what needs to be carried across in the TL text, what aspects of the original play need to be respected during the translation process and what kind of alterations need to be made to the original, so as to achieve optimal possible resemblance and make the TL drama accessible and appreciable to the target audience/readers in terms of minimal processing effort requirements.